Every three years, the surgeons come to our street and operate on the plane trees. Their nonchalance is remarkable. First, they loop ropes over the highest branches that they estimate will bear their weight, then they swing upwards, bare-legged in shorts and boots, chainsaws dangling from their waistbands, casually hollering to each other as if they were Tarzans, before they press their noisy tools into life and the cutting begins. They are all young men – English, so far as I can tell – and it may be that some of them like to show off. At any rate, they’re quick and efficient. The branches come crashing to the ground, to be fed by other young men into a whirring machine that reduces them to woodchips. An older man with a broom sweeps up the twigs and the sawdust. The surgeons load their vans and move on.

Introducing 'treeconomics': how street trees can save our cities

Read more

The trees they leave behind give a good impression of the aftermath of Passchendaele or the Somme, their complicated foliage reduced to the skeleton of a trunk and a few leafless branches. In this way, crude but effective, the local council curbs tree growth and the possibility of litigation from householders who blame their cracked walls and ceilings on the spread of ever-thirsty roots.

Did anyone envisage this damaging possibility when the trees were planted and the houses built, in 1890? It seems unlikely. The hybridised plane trees that arrived in London from Spain and France late in the 17th century soon became such a feature of parks, squares and gardens that they were known as the London plane.

Nobody thought to plant them along pavements in the capital, however, until the Paris-inspired craze for tree-lined boulevards crossed the Channel in the mid-19th century. The Victoria Embankment, completed by Joseph Bazalgette in 1870, was lined with London planes the next year, and other new thoroughfares such as Northumberland Avenue soon followed.

As the capital went on expanding it became de rigueur for all but the meanest suburban streets to have trees. In late-19th-century Camberwell, according to an account of the planting there, the best and widest avenues got the large trees such as the plane and horse chestnut, while streets slightly lower down the social scale made do with limes, laburnums and acacias. (The houses of the poorest class faced “unadorned macadam”.)

But in most London streets the plane ruled supreme. It was hardy and adaptable and it shed its bark frequently – a pleasing habit in an age when smoke blackened everything from shirt collars to tree trunks. “Nothing very remarkable is to be found in the way of street trees in London, the everlasting plane having been used almost to the exclusion of every other species,” wrote the forester AD Webster in 1920, estimating that planes made up 60% of the trees “used for shade and ornamentation”.

Today, according to the tree enthusiast Paul Wood, that figure is as little as 4% in inner London, shrinking further to 1.4% in greater London. The plane’s dominance was already weakening in the inter-war period, when smaller, shorter-lived and faster-growing trees – the silver birch and the bird cherry, for example – began to populate the new crescents, closes and avenues of the further suburbs. But the growth in variety in the decades since is truly astonishing. According to Wood’s reckoning, 900,000 out of a total of 8.4m London trees grow on a street, and those 900,000 street trees are made up of around 500 different species and cultivars – a number that Wood has counted personally. The fascinating histories of many of them are recounted in his new guidebook, London’s Street Trees: A Field Guide to the Urban Forest, which is published this month.

For someone like me who’s not a natural naturalist, the book reveals a previously unconsidered world situated just outside the front door, or at most only a bus ride away. On a glorious blue afternoon this week I walked with the author across Islington, where both of us live, and discovered something interesting and beautiful (this is the month when foliage green is greenest) on nearly every street, often in a striking counterpoint to a backdrop of kebab shops, mini-markets and heavy traffic.

A small-leaved lime that died and fell recently in Poland’s Białowieża Forest. An upright example can be seen in Hackney. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Almost as soon as we left his front door we saw a tree of heaven, a species that arrived from China in the 18th century and at one time rivalled the plane in its reputation for resilience to the smoke. New Yorkers know it as the ghetto palm. Wood described it as invasive and undesirable – the leaves of the male tree “smell like old trainers”.

Then we spotted a false acacia, introduced from North America in the 17th century, praised by the diarist and gardener John Evelyn for its “exotic leaf and sweet flowers” and admired by Wood for its slender height and spare foliage, “as though it came out of a Dutch landscape painting”. After that came a succession of trees I had never heard of: the manna ash, the Chonosuki crabapple, the Turkish hazel and the sand pear (a Chinese variety with large fruit that drop heavily on parked cars).

Some were prized for their spring blossom and others for their autumn leaves. Then, not far from Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency office, we came across a little tree called summer bells (Chitalpa tashkentensis), developed in the 1960s by Soviet horticulturists who crossed two American species, the Indian bean tree and the desert willow, though to no great point so far as I could see.

London's 900,000 street trees are made up of around 500 different species and cultivars

The olive, the American sweetgum, the nettle tree, the Himalayan birch: these are among the trees that represent the new orthodoxy in planting: small trees for the short term, easily replaced, planted in mixed groups to curb the transmission of disease and, with luck, adaptable to a changing climate. A few are native. When we crossed briefly into the borough of Hackney, which has an adventurous policy of species selection, Wood found a native small-leaved lime (a prized source of decorative-carving wood – Grinling Gibbons used it in St Paul’s) and next to it what he described as his favourite of all street trees, a wild service tree, sometimes known as chequers, the berries of which brewers used to flavour beer before they discovered hops.

Finally, we reached my own street, where in their imitation of the western front the amputated branches of the big London planes reach towards the sky. They could last for another century, though they may not. Cost is against them: like old human beings, old trees need more money to look after, which helps explain their controversial destruction in Sheffield by a private company, Amey, hired by the council to maintain them.

There is also the prospect of disease. The 42,000 plane trees that line the Canal du Midi in southern France are all to be cut down because of a canker known as “plane tree wilt”, which has recently been reported as far north as Paris. If it reached London, landmarks such as the Mall, Berkeley Square and the Embankment would lose a lot of their familiar grandeur.

Street trees do all kinds of practical good that couldn’t have been foreseen when they were first planted: carbon sequestration, water runoff absorption and so forth. But beauty remains the real reason for their being. In total, they cost the London boroughs between £40m and £45m a year, having somehow endured, in Wood’s phrase, as “one of the last locally defined areas of civic life”. In all their glorious variety, they stand as a living monument to the municipal instinct, cheap at the price.